Amor Mundi 11/16/14

11-17-2014

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Place As Destiny

If Charles Murray's book Coming Apart chronicles the vast divergences between the richest and poorest communities in America, Claude S. Fischer gathers a series of studies and new books to argue that the places we live and grow up have an outsized impact on our future. Writing in the Boston Review, Fischer reports that "the places-the communities, neighborhoods, blocks-where people live act as a factor in slowing economic mobility." There are many reasons that poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods pass on poverty. "Consider the ways that the immediate environment shapes a child's development. It does so physically. Air and soil pollution, noise, and traffic, for example, measurably affect children's health, stress, and cognitive development. Local institutions and resources, such as the policing, quality of the schools, availability of health services, food options, parks, and so on matter, as well. And the social environment may matter most of all. Growing up in a community with gangs, dangerous streets, discouraging role models, confused social expectations, and few connections to outsiders commanding resources is a burden for any child. Just getting by day-to-day can be a struggle. In a pair of studies, Sharkey found that a violent crime occurring near black children's homes in the days before they took a standardized test reduced their scores on the test, presumably because of anxiety and distraction." One major difference between Murray and Fischer is their consideration of race. Murray focuses on white poverty and the incredible rise of white inequality to argue that the decadence and disconnect of the new poor happens regardless of race. Fischer demurs: "No discussion of neighborhood effects can ignore the racial dimension, because the residential segregation of blacks has been and, though reduced, continues to be extreme: 41 percent of the African-American parent-child pairs in the study grew up in poor neighborhoods in both generations; only 2 percent of white families did. Poor whites were less likely to live in concentrated areas of poverty and are more likely to get out of them if they did. The weight of the past is much heavier for some than others."

Will The Masses Procrastinate By Writing Papers

Contrarian poet and uncreative writer Kenneth Goldsmith is going to spend next semester teaching 21st century leisure. He explains: "Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection, for three hours a week, in a course called 'Wasting Time on the Internet.' Although we'll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature. To bolster their practice, they'll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting, through critical texts by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly, Erving Goffman, Raymond Williams, and John Cage. Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir."

Forget Privacy

12 years ago, Felix Stalder could already see how the rise of a networked society would lead individuals to trade privacy for personal service: "We live in a surveillance society. The creation, collection and processing of personal data is nearly a ubiquitous phenomenon. Every time we use a loyalty card at a retailer, our names are correlated with our purchases and entered into giant databases. Every time we pass an electronic tollbooth on the highway, every time we use a cell phone or a credit card, our locations are being recorded, analyzed and stored. Every time we go to see a doctor, submit an insurance claim, pay our utility bills, interact with the government, or go online, the picture gleaned from our actions and states grows finer and fatter." For Stalder, the traditional idea of privacy - that I control my information and data-is simply impossible to uphold in the modern world. Instead of talking about privacy - which he thinks an antiquated idea-we need to begin asking how to prevent the abuse of information. "Rather than continuing on the defensive by trying to maintain an ever-weakening illusion of privacy, we have to shift to the offensive and start demanding accountability of those whose power is enhanced by the new connections. In a democracy, political power is, at least ideally, tamed by making the government accountable to those who are governed and not by carving out areas in which the law doesn't apply. It is, in this perspective, perhaps no co-incidence that many of the strongest privacy advocates (at least in the US) lean politically towards libertarianism, a movement which includes on its fringe white militias that try to set up zones liberated from the US government. In our democracies, extensive institutional mechanisms have been put into to place to create and maintain accountability and to punish those who abuse their power. We need to develop and instate similar mechanisms for the handling of personal information - a technique as crucial to power as the ability to exercise physical violence - in order to limit the concentration of power inherent in situations that involve unchecked surveillance. The current notion of privacy, which frames the issue as a personal one, won't help us accomplish that."

Fail Quicker

Adam Davis says that our present and sped up culture of disruptive innovation is really as much a culture of failure: "An age of constant invention naturally begets one of constant failure. The life span of an innovation, in fact, has never been shorter. An African hand ax from 285,000 years ago, for instance, was essentially identical to those made some 250,000 years later. The Sumerians believed that the hoe was invented by a godlike figure named Enlil a few thousand years before Jesus, but a similar tool was being used a thousand years after his death. During the Middle Ages, amid major advances in agriculture, warfare, and building technology, the failure loop closed to less than a century. During the Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution, it was reduced to about a lifetime. By the 20th century, it could be measured in decades. Today, it is best measured in years and, for some products, even less.... The closure of the failure loop has sent uncomfortable ripples through the economy. When a product or company is no longer valued in the marketplace, there are typically thousands of workers whose own market value diminishes, too. Our breakneck pace of innovation can be seen in stock-market volatility and other boardroom metrics, but it can also be measured in unemployment checks, in divorces and involuntary moves, and in promising careers turned stagnant. Every derelict product that makes its way into Weird Stuff exists as part of a massive ecosystem of human lives - of engineers and manufacturers; sales people and marketing departments; logistics planners and truck drivers - that has shared in this process of failure."

The Eternal Jew

In "Antisemitism," Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt discusses the emergence of the Jewish Type, the Jew in General, as it came to be in Germany in the 19th century. "Jewishness," she wrote, "became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every individual Jew." And yet it is also the case that the Nazis still imagined Judaism as a physical attribute and not simply a psychology. As Sara Lipton reminds us in the New York Review of Books, "In 1940 the Nazis released a propaganda film called The Eternal Jew. The film claimed to show the Jews in their 'original state,' 'before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans.' Stagings of Jewish rituals were interspersed with scenes of yarmulke- and caftan-wearing Jews shuffling down crowded alleys, all meant to show the benighted nature of Jewish life. Above all, the filmmakers focused on Jewish faces. They trained their cameras in lingering close-up on their subjects' eyes, noses, beards, and mouths, confident that the sight of certain stereotypical features would arouse responses of loathing and contempt."

The Human Sciences

In an interview with the Yale Daily News, Leon Botstein speaks about his lecture "Beyond Fashion and Fear: The Future of the Humanities and the Arts in the University." Botstein advises that we stop the high-minded defenses of the humanities and focus on teaching them in ways that are meaningful: "If we really believed that the humanities were vital, how would we organize them?" It may well be that what is most useful about the humanities is not the most advanced and critical research but the reading and consideration of foundational texts and works of art. The humanities, as Hannah Arendt understood, are important insofar as they preserve and conserve the common world. An example of their importance is visible in Botstein's answer to a question about the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math: "My position is that the STEM fields cannot exist without the humanities, and that the humanities cannot exist without the STEM fields. The separation is purely bureaucratic; it's purely a structural separation having to do with the way it's 'easier' to organize things within a university. My view is that anybody who is interested in the humanities is at his or her peril to not think about the fundamental role of science, technology, engineering and the character of science, and vice versa; there's no serious scientist in the world that isn't confronted with - that doesn't deal with - the non-'purely scientific' or nontechnical motivations or consequences of their work. The separation of the two is nonsensical."

Why So Serious?

In a review of Slavoj Zizek's two newest books, Terry Eagleton considers the Slovenian philosopher's sense of humor: "There is a dash of the Dubliner Oscar Wilde in Zizek, a man who couldn't hear a pious English sentiment without feeling an irresistible itch to reverse its terms, rip it inside out, or stand it on its head. Zizek, who has the grim appearance of a hired assassin in a Jacobean tragedy, lacks Wilde's stylishness and elegance. He also lacks his distinctive brand of humour. Zizek is funny but not witty. He tells some excellent jokes and has a well-honed sense of the absurd, but one couldn't extract a book of epigrams from his writing, as one can from Wilde's. Both men, however, are natural-born debunkers and deconstructors, allergic to high moral tones and good clean fun. That Zizek should be a skilled exponent of Jewish black humour, the Woody Allen of Ljubljana, comes as no surprise. Even so, his urge to deface and deflate is a long way from cynicism. Remarkably, he combines the tragic vision of Freud with a Marxist faith in the future."

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